The city by the Bay proves an exotic backdrop for historical murder mystery

Frog MusicEmma Donoghue (HarperCollins)In Town: The author will appearing at the Ottawa Writers Festival on April 28 at 6:30 p.m. at Knox Church, 120 Lisgar St.

San Francisco has always been a place where eccentrics are celebrated. And difference has been welcomed.

It is also a favourite setting for writers, including the transplanted Irish, now Canadian, writer Emma Donoghue, who has turned a real murder in 19th century San Francisco into a delightful exploration of the place and its people.

Donoghue willingly admits that she loves the place.

“I have a sister in the area and I have been lucky enough to go there many times, but only for short, tantalizing visits.

“I’ve never really had a proper block of time there, but it is the most exciting city. Partly it’s literally the layout, the up and downwards of it. Even walking there you need to use different muscles. And it’s always represented so much freedom and opportunity.”

San Francisco was one of the very first places to offer a modern city experience as a place that seemed beyond rules, Donoghue said. It also had a multi-ethnic population.

“It was known from the start as a wild and crazy place where you went if you wanted to be free.

“It had this amazing reputation as being on the edge of the world.”

As she approached writing this book, Donoghue threw herself into research.

She was looking for the kind of social history that takes the reader to the street at the time. For example, she said, people didn’t cook in ’Frisco in the late 1800s. They went out to dinner. People did not buy houses and settle down.

“I always do a huge amount of research. You can’t be strategic about it, you’ve got to do too much. You’ve got to follow up every strange little tangent. You never know what will prove to be interesting.

“You want to be authentic about the time, but you don’t want it to be like everyone else’s version of the place.”

Luckily, Donoghue was able to find a motherlode of information on — where else — the Internet.

“There was a lot of photography of the time. I found this incredibly detailed map that the city itself drew up. It showed every building in Chinatown and each one was labelled, things like French grocery, or Chinese prostitution.”

A novel like Frog Music could have been written 20 years ago, but it would have taken years, she said. The Internet and data bases dedicated to family history have changed the access to invaluable information.

Donoghue’s characters aren’t the kind of people who were well known. “They were the scum of society, the low-lifes,” she says.

Writers take their inspiration where they find it. Donoghue says it was the brilliant TV show The Wire that pushed her along. “I want people to care about these fringe drifters the way we care about every little drug dealer in The Wire.”

Frog Music is a murder mystery. A young woman, named Jenny, who makes her living catching frogs for restaurants, is killed. It is a real case detailed in the newspapers of the day.

Her friend, a young, French, exotic dancer named Blanche, vows to find her killer and thus the story unfolds.

Donoghue, who has never touched a frog in her life, says she believes historical novels allow the exploration of modern themes.

“One of the things it is about is gender. I am always interested in the rules of gender for every era. The pros and cons of how you ‘play’ your gender. Blanche, for example, decides to sell her sex appeal. She literally profits from it.

“The American West gave some women a chance to be different, to be themselves.”

Donoghue loves cases that need fiction to complete the story.

“I love the tension between the grit of fact and the pearl that forms around it.”

She drew on about 60 different newspaper articles about the case, which was never solved. The story was even picked up by papers in New York. The murder was eventually tied to a French Canadian, who hanged himself in jail, but the accusation was never tested in court.

Donoghue’s first few books were set in Dublin and were very much about her own experiences, but since then she has roamed far afield, from medieval times to the present.

“I get drawn to certain stories and I don’t care where they happened or when. Certain themes do come up over and over. I write a lot about immigration, maybe because I’ve done it twice.

“In the last couple of books parenting comes up a lot because I am one.”

And she says historical fiction itself has emerged from its ghetto.

“It used to be thought of as bodice rippers. But through fiction, a lot of people have become very interested in what the past was like.

“I remember my first historical novel, my agent was saying ‘how are we going to sell this one,’ and nowadays no agent is saying that. Readers have come to take stuff set in the past very seriously.”

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